Apple TV: an in-depth review

So what does the Apple TV have to offer me?someone who has been slightly …

Encoding video, video quality, and music

Apple doesn't exactly make it simple to watch content that's
not purchased from iTunes, and the Apple TV was clearly meant to be an iTunes
portal for the living room. The Apple TV's spec page
indicates that it supports a very limited number of file formats:
anything from the iTunes store, H.264-encoded movies, and MPEG-4 video.
For the average user, these will likely be fine, and it's not hard
encoding one's own movies to fit one of these formats. On both the PC and the Mac, a
user can employ QuickTime Pro ($29 from Apple) to open a number of
different formats and then encode them "for Apple TV":

This is one of the simplest solutions and requires the least amount of savvy. There are also several turn-key applications for the Mac targeted for iPod encoding such as ViddyUp (formerly Podner) ($9.95) and iSquint (free) that can be adjusted to produce video files in resolutions more appropriate for the Apple TV. There are other open-source projects like FFMpegX that offer more precise control over the final product and applications like HandBrake that allow for complete DVD to iPod/Apple TV/iTunes-compatible video file workflows.

For Windows, aside from QuickTime Pro, you can use Nero Recode ($79.99) to encode nearly any video file and/or DVDs to an AppleTV-friendly format. We here at Ars have used the app in the past to encode DVDs for iPod and it would work in the same manner for the Apple TV. Other apps that can encode into an AppleTV-friendly format include DVDXSoft's iPod Video Converter ($29.95), and Video to iPod V 1.0 ($29.95).

Once a video is exported for Apple TV, the user can then import the movie into his or her iTunes library and display it on the Apple TV through the "Movies" submenu given that your file conforms to specific resolution and bitrate parameters specified on the Apple TV specifications page:

MPEG-4: Up to 3 Mbps, Simple Profile with AAC-LC audio up to 160 Kbps
(maximum resolution: 720 by 432 pixels at 30 fps)

But what if you want to do more than encode your own home movies for display through the Apple TV? For example, someone who happens to have high-definition video files might want to stream or sync those with the Apple TV in order to watch them on the TV instead of the computer screen.

As it turns out, "the Apple TV can play anything iTunes can play" is not entirely true, as some formats that are encoded properly for import into iTunes cannot be played on the Apple TV. As quoted above, the Apple TV needs to have MPEG4 and H.264 encoded video that do not exceed certain parameters. This means that, for example, if you were to encode a copy of 2001: A Space Odyssey into a 1280x720 MPEG4, iTunes would play the file without issue, but when instructed to sync this file to the Apple TV, an error would be produced and the file would not be synced.

It's unclear whether or not this is an artificial limitation applied by iTunes to keep files that may play poorly on the Apple TV from degrading the overall experience, or whether the hardware on the Apple TV is simply incapable of accepting these files. We're assuming the former for the time being, although we've seen the Apple TV struggle at times with low-resolution materials. We could not produce this with all videos we watched, but select shows (including some shows purchased from Apple) would stutter (drop frames, briefly hang) when the on-screen timelapse bar would fade off the screen. It was minor and not everyone noticed it, but it was present. It is difficult at this time to determine if what we saw was the result of hardware pushed to the max or software that needs further optimization. The latter recommends itself because the phenomenon was not consistent.

If encoded in an Apple TV-friendly way, however, HD content can be played on the Apple TV without incident. One option for watching HD content through the Apple TV would be to use a TV tuner, such as the eyeTV 500 on the Mac, to record HD video. You can then have the software automatically encode the recorded shows or movies for iPod/Apple TV, which would then be able to be played through the Apple TV. Since the iTunes Store does not currently offer video content in HD, encoding your own is currently the only way to take advantage of the Apple TV's HD capabilities.

Video quality

Since your own HD content will display as expected on an HDTV once encoded within certain parameters, let's focus on the entire purpose of the product for a moment: acting as a trojan horse to get people to buy more iTunes content. As mentioned previously, the iTunes Store does not currently have any video content available in HD, including the movie trailers that are streamed directly to the Apple TV. This is obviously a huge limitation for not just the Apple TV, but the iTunes Store itself. But the fact that Apple has released the Apple TV with HD capabilities shows that the company doesn't plan to keep iTunes that way for long. Who knows how long it may take to see HD content show up on iTunes, but I would not expect it to be any more than several months from now. Apple would be just plain stupid to bait us with the HD carrot and then not deliver with any purchasable content in HD.

So for now, we'll have to make do with what we have. On a SDTV, content from the iTunes Store, as played through the Apple TV, looks fine and comparable to any other TV show. However, if your SDTV is set to its default screen ratio settings (which it most likely is), the Apple TV attempts to horizontally squish the video content down to fit the screen. For example, episodes of The Office come in widescreen format from the iTunes Store, but when viewed on an SDTV, it's not cropped or letterboxed. Oddly, this squishing phenomenon also happens with content from iTunes that is not in widescreen format as well—anything that comes in 4:3 also gets squished down, and results in black bars on the right and left side of the screen. Everyone's faces are stretched vertically.

However, this phenomenon isn't irreparable. We were able to change the ratio settings on my SDTV to display in 16:9 instead of 4:3, which resulted in letterboxed video display from the Apple TV if the content is widescreen and "normal" display if the content is not. This option is certainly better than watching elongated faces.

On an HDTV, the currently-available content from iTunes is obviously not going to take advantage of the TV's capabilities. However, despite some early claims of "blurriness," we found that how the Apple TV displays the content on an HDTV is more akin to what we would describe as "jpeggy-ness" (also known as dithering). The Apple TV is forced to scale up the video resolution for the HDTV, but it attempts to compensate for the expected blurry pixels by anti-aliasing in between to create cleaner lines. We watched a trailer for the movie 300 streamed from the iTunes Store on the 42-inch HDTV along with a handful of young professionals—absolutely none of which batted an eye at the video quality whatsoever (in fact, there were several comments about how good it looked). Regardless, to an HDTV aficionado or anyone looking closely at the lines, the somewhat "painted" look of the video is obvious.

Again, all that can be done is to encode your own HD videos—an extra step that some may not consider to be worth their time—or wait for Apple to add HD content to iTunes.

In our experiments, while the Apple TV selects standard-definition trailers in its "Theatrical Trailer" section, it's completely possible to download 720p HD trailers from Apple's trailer web site, add them to your iTunes library, and to stream and sync these high-resolution trailers directly to the Apple TV. Apple has probably chosen to go the low-resolution route with trailers to improve perceived responsiveness in regards to download times with the disadvantage of scaled and filtered video.

Music

Streaming music to the Apple TV is as simple as streaming video. You can navigate through your playlists easily from any computer that's set up as a source, or through whatever has been synced to the Apple TV's hard drive. The Apple TV supports AAC, MP3, MP3 VBR, Apple Lossless, AIFF, and WAV audio formats—practically anything that iTunes can play. The user can play podcasts and audio books that are bought from iTunes, but not audiobooks that have been purchased through other iTunes-compatible sources like Audible.com. This has enraged many an audiobook fan, and it's not entirely clear what the reason for this limitation is.

In our testing, the optical audio link worked as advertised, and the audio quality was excellent given that we were testing primarily with lossy music. Playback of Apple Lossless music was excellent, and brighter than we experienced when hooking an iPod up directly to an audio receiver. That said, a true audiophile would likely find fault with the Apple TV, just as they might find fault with the iPod.

The visual display when music is playing is pretty boring though: a progress bar and a picture of the album art to the side. Apple could have done more with that. The screen saver mode on the Apple TV is significantly more interesting when set to use album art: